Many forces in higher education claim digital competence is a priority - policy frameworks, institutional strategies, educators and staff, employers, and students themselves. But they often don’t mean the same thing by it. Why it matters, who it matters to, who should develop it, and how seriously it should be treated differ depending on who you ask. The institutional infrastructure built to develop it has to hold all these competing purposes at once.

This paper reflects that tension from the inside. The LevUL Up Digital Skills Hub (DSH), established in 2023 and hosted on UL’s Brightspace VLE, supports the development of core digital skills and competencies, primarily of students. It is open to the UL community for self-directed exploration and is intentionally designed to be collaboratively embedded into academic curricula with educators. The self-assessment opportunities, self-study resources, and GenAI literacy activities it provides can be assessed as coursework. 3,750 people are currently enrolled in it, and it is embedded in 14 modules.

No institutional mechanism triggers embedding. Instead, each embed emerges through conversation, shaped by disciplinary context, module design, and individual advocacy. Those conversations surface something strategic documents rarely capture. Some module leads who embrace embedding do so for different reasons than those who comply. They see digital competence as intrinsic to their discipline and their graduates, while the others are directed to include it. Enthusiastic module leads want critically literate graduates; others are responding to employability pressures. The question “Who is this for?” receives different answers depending on who you ask - and those answers shape what gets built.

Students hold competing expectations too. Emerging findings from a HEA Pathfinder funded student co-design study on GenAI literacy and academic integrity (AI-LIT), grounded in Students as Partners principles (Ní Bheoláin, Lowney & O'Riordan, 2020), reveal that learners simultaneously want clear institutional guidance and direction alongside personal agency to chart their own path in this area. Their motivations span academic need, professional anxiety around future prospects, and genuine curiosity.

This paper offers a practitioner perspective on navigating these competing purposes and argues that spotlighting them is a precondition for digital competence provision that effectively serves students.

Attendees will take away an honest account of navigating these tensions and a question worth asking: before asking how to develop digital competence, might we first ask who it is for and why.

References

Ní Bheoláin, Ruth, Lowney, Rob, & O’Riordan, Fiona. (2020). Students as Partners in Assessment (SaPiA): A Literature Scoping Review. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4270579